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Archive → March, 2018

If I had another son, he would not be like David Hogg, and I hope my actual son is never like Hogg, either.

Because he is an actor, i.e. a self-absorbed vacuous fool used to making pretend, David Hogg is the currently anointed spokesman for America’s gun prohibitionist movement, which had a fake march last Saturday in DC.

Hogg is foul mouthed, disrespectful, rude, petulant, arrogant, dismissive, and ignorant of the basic facts. And he is just a kid, all of seventeen years old! What a fantastic start to life this kid is on….

Even worse, he appears to be a big time liar.

Hogg cannot make up his mind about where he was during Nikolas Cruz’s massacre at Parkland High School. In different videotaped interviews, he has given several very different accounts of where he was that moment and that day: At home, in the school, and somewhere in between, and maybe even really far away.

His location is important, because it either adds to or detracts from his credibility as a purported first-hand witness. He certainly represents himself as a first-hand witness to the massacre. As a first-hand witness, Hogg could (and does) claim an extra helping of emotion-laden judgmentalism, something adults regularly excuse in children like Hogg, under certain extenuating circumstances. Watching your classmates get gunned down because of Obama policies like PROMISE would count as one of those extenuating circumstances.

But it is not at all evident that Hogg was indeed anywhere close to his school that moment or even that day.

Credibility shot, Hogg has yet wallowed in the liberal media’s fawning attention, avoiding any hard questions and instead accusing adults who simply disagree with his childish views of having “blood on their hands” and of making him feel threatened.

Hogg has not criticized the chickensh!t deputies who stood outside the school while the shooting continued, nor has he criticized the incompetent sheriff, the Keystone Kops FBI agents who dropped the ball, nor the PROMISE program that served up an armed Cruz on a silver platter.

Hogg’s piggish behavior proves why going to bed on time and not getting dessert until you have eaten all of your dinner is an important rule for all children. Otherwise, we get spoiled, rotten kids, like Hogg. Yuck.

And not to miss an opportunity to use childrens’ corpses as political props and living children as emotional human shields, the adult-run gun prohibitionist movement and their Hollywood and media allies hyped up a march in DC that in the end was about 200,000 people. No small feat, and certainly a respectable number of people at any protest. But not representative of anything more than the usual political radicals, avowed Communists, and partisan Democrats, all of whom show up to any rally at the drop of a hat.

Instead of being the kids’ march for school safety, it was dominated by adults who just hate guns, so there, and want to take them all away from the law-abiding among us. Their plan for disarming the criminals has yet to be announced.

About 20% of the participants were kids, not anywhere close to the 50% or 90% it was planned to be.

In the end, the march was a bunch of feral hogs, running wild, led by the loudest, smelliest of them all, David Hogg. Not my boy, not my kid.

Is anyone tallying the in-kind political campaign contributions donated by the US media, Google, FakeBook, Twitter, and the rest of Silicon Valley to one particular political party?

The hoopla surrounding the pairing of FakeBook user data with Cambridge Analytica sounds like someone committed a crime. But that is only because conservatives did it, and they actually paid money for it. As opposed to Google and FakeBook, which practically lived full-time at the Obama White House.

For free. As in they donated their private user data to one political party for free. Without disclosure, without attribution.

Google and FakeBook in particular have been working hand-in-glove with just one political party, and especially with the past Obama administration, giving away user data for free, and artificially suppressing users opposed to the Obama revolution.

Recall how typing into the Google search engine variations of “Hillary Clinton crime criminal” would generate ridiculous results, like “Hillary Clinton’s position on crime control” complete with a smiling glamor shot of Hillary Clinton. Nowhere in Google’s search results would be anything about how Hillary Clinton was an actual criminal, or a suspected criminal who had been and was being criminally investigated.

That is worth money.

And how about that September 2016 Barron’s Weekly, with the grinning glamor photo of Hillary Clinton under the headline “Time for President Hillary?”

This kind of free promotional advertising is worth huge bucks.

And the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times were all proud to openly promote Clinton and attack Republicans. Not just in their editorial pages, but in their “news.” Their “news” reporting became wall-to-wall political advertising and attacks.

The US media has been an obvious mouthpiece for this one political party and its candidates, cheering them on and covering up for them. Big bucks, folks, huge contributions.

What’s that you say, what about Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity?

Folks, if the US media just did their jobs as reporters – facts instead of activism – there would be no demand for Limbaugh or Fox News or Breitbart. Only because the media is a wholly owned subsidiary of one political party is there a demand for other views to be aired. And that is going to happen somewhere.

God forbid there are literally a handful of news outlets not controlled by the establishment media and their political party!

So what is the value of all this collusion between Google, and FakeBook, and Twitter? All the user data they gleefully provided to the Obama White House and the 2012 Obama campaign? You know, the private user data that the Obama campaign gloated about in public.

Someone needs to get to the bottom of this. I’d just ballpark the in-kind contribution value at about a billion dollars. At least. And none of it was officially disclosed on campaign disclosure documents.

All illegal behavior and political contributions, folks. A lot of fines, and maybe jail time for people. But because the chosen side did it, it’s fine, apparently. Well, not to me, it isn’t, despite the mainstream media’s unwillingness to report it.

Get a special investigator and prosecutor on this right away. Hold these law-breakers accountable. Because we all really care about upholding the law, right?

Yes, today’s slavery is the long-going slavery of Africa, where after a thousand years of continuous slaving, both Africans and Arabs still enslave weaker Africans and sell them or use them as slaves. The contraband diamond pits of west Africa are where many African slaves are sent nowadays, even as small children. Worked unceasingly with little food or shelter, people don’t last long in these roles.

This is occasionally reported in the press, mostly in the English media, which has a commendably long history of abolitionist fervor.

Yes, it is also the “white” slavery of Asia, Europe, and America, where every-day people down on their luck disappear from streets, bars, and hotels. Some are already prostitutes, largely separated from their families and friends, and thus already vulnerable to going missing. They are already easy pickings for disappearing and sale abroad. Plenty of white girls from stable middle-income homes are included; “runaways” who are never found.

Many are sold to Asian, Arab, and European oligarchs, who use these slaves for personal pleasure until they are done with their “fun,” and then they discard them like a broken toy. The discard is usually some sadistic and gruesome ending.

Plenty of Chinese and Latin American people are being shipped over into America as slaves, too, as are Russians and Ukrainians. They have specific destinations, usually factories, where they are promised eventual release for working long days. If you think they are eventually released, don’t kid yourself. Once a human being is enslaved, that’s it. Pretty much only escaping is the happy answer to the question of what next.

A very tiny amount of this is reported in any media, and why this is so, remains a mystery. After all, slavery is slavery is slavery. It is all bad. The Chinese human trafficking does seem to get more media attention, probably because Chinese are considered to be a “minority” in America, and therefore some sort of at-risk population. And we know how the US media like a good victim, real or imagined. It is difficult to understand how an Asian slave is more of a victim than a Caucasian slave from the corn fields of Iowa, but this is how multiculturalism warps people’s views. And no one has a more warped view than a person holding a degree in journalism.

And then there is the new slavery, and it is the worst of all because it is done under the guise of “kindness” or “fairness,” and it has the force of government coercion behind it.

We are talking here about big government socialism making a full-out assault on Western democracies, and an assault on the idea of the free individual, under the guise of fairness and equality, everyone being treated the same.

Of course, the fairness and equality of socialism and Marxism are forced on people, by a big government apparatus. You do not have a choice in the matter. And it is always sold as being done with the best of intentions, even when it turns into a disaster, as have all socialist and Marxist governments.

The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen.

The stronger the government, the weaker the citizen.

Although by modern standards and definitions, citizens are supposed to control their governments, western civilization is now succumbing to a Marxist march that was begun a hundred years ago. But it really picked up steam in the 1970s, when colleges began stacking their decks with avowed Marxists who then indoctrinated the young people coming to them for education. Year after year, young people have gone to college to get an education, and instead have emerged with a seething hatred for everything blocking the Marxist takeover of America: Armed citizens, conservatives, Republicans, businesses, the Constitution.

What is now under way is the aggressive attempt to enslave Americans to a form of government completely alien to how America was founded. A tremendous clash is shaping up, not between Democrats and Republicans, but between about 25% of the population that loves freedom and individual liberty on the one side, and about 20% of the population that believes in forcing Marxism on everyone through big government programs and restrictions on the other hand.

The Democrat Party is, as it always was, the party of slavery. It is the Democrat Party that is the official voice and political force for Marxism through big government, and therefore it is the force of slavery in our day.

Sadly, the Republican Party is not the abolitionist party it was in the 1850s and 1950s. No, today the Republican Party has been largely co-opted by Marxism-lite, with most elected Republicans around America being “moderates” who neither stand up for the citizenry nor for America. These are big government Republicans who have made a business of government, turning government operations into a get-rich scheme. They simply delay the day that Marxist slavery arrives, they do not actively, aggressively oppose it. They are too busy trying to get rich off the citizenry.

And if we kind of follow this line of thinking to its logical conclusion, as the politics are likely to play out, then that makes Justice Neil Gorsuch about the most endangered human being on the planet. And that is because he alone is the deciding vote, for now, blocking the anti-Constitution Marxists on the US Supreme Court from implementing their judicial coup d’etat over America’s citizenry (their stated goal of overriding the Second Amendment and forcefully disarming Americans, through, what else, massive, invasive, personal government coercion, exactly what the Second Amendment was designed to prevent).

Frankly speaking, and yes, it saddens me to observe this, with all of the Democrat street violence aimed at conservatives over the past two years, and with all of Obama’s illegal government spying against his political opponents and attempts to frame them and put them in jail, and with this latest DC march to disarm innocent civilians who have done nothing but live by their Constitution, and with all of the media now siding with the big government Marxist slavers, it is surprising that America has not experienced a wave of political assassinations.

Jakob-Creutzfelt Disease in Europe was traced back to a self-styled secret society in Italy, where members filed solemnly down into ancient burial crypts and drank local wine from the skull of a deceased past master.

No lie. Look it up if you like. Yes, people do strange things.

Even hundreds of years later, after the past master had died, the JCD ‘bug’ was still infesting that old skull of his, and the wine swilled from it carried the bug down the gullets of the secret society members and into their bodies. A lot of these secret society members died bizarre, horrible deaths, prompting health officials to investigate what was going on.

To date this is likely the only investigation in Italy’s history that was both scientific and professional. And that is because it involved drinking wine.

JCD basically eats your brain and leaves you a drooling, deficient, dying husk of a human being. You die pretty quickly, and it is an ugly death.

“Spongiform disease” is also how this kind of prion-based attack is known, because the person’s brain looks like a sponge, riddled through with holes where brain matter ought to be. Survival is not an option.

There is no cure, and the cancer-like prions use their protein shells to fully resist fire, cold, desiccation, Hollywood, and high cholesterol. Once a prion is present, it cannot be destroyed by anything human. Prions seem to live forever in the dirt under your feet, and possibly in food grown in that dirt, like corn and soybeans.

JCD is known as Mad Cow Disease among bovines, Scrapie among sheep, and Chronic Wasting Disease among cervids, like deer, here in America. In other words, there is a prion out there for every mammal, though this is a new science we are just beginning to understand.

For a long time the guy who discovered prions was said to be a fake. And then his work was replicated, and he became a celebrated scientist. The politics of “climate change science” do not apply to prions and human health, thankfully.

One thing is clear: Prions develop most among wild animals that are new to being domesticated, like deer. It is their bodies’ reaction to being unnaturally cooped up. Something in the wild animals’ artificially confined body is misfiring, going haywire, and imploding.

CWD has its genesis in the wildlife management equivalent of drinking wine from a human skull: In most states, including Pennsylvania, deer farms are not required to have two strands of metal fencing separating the confined deer from wild deer. Deer are not yet a domesticated species (if cows, sheep and goats are any indication, it will take another 3,000 years to domesticate deer), they are still wild, and they herd up for protection, as do all social animals.

As a result, wild deer approach the deer inside the deer farm enclosure, touch noses through the fence, exchange body fluids, and get CWD. The wild deer then leave and go off into the wild deer populations and spread CWD among otherwise healthy deer across the landscape.

As a result of this madness, CWD is spreading through Pennsylvania like wildfire, except no one is paying attention. Not really. Only the Pennsylvania Game Commission is trying to solve this crisis, and the agency is being stonewalled at every turn.

You know why?

Because the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture is protecting a nascent $16 million annual deer farm business sector from having to install double fencing.

Do you know what hunting is worth annually in Pennsylvania? It is worth $1.6 BILLION, and a great deal of that is from deer hunting.

So here in Pennsylvania, we have a state agency, the PA Dept. of Agriculture, essentially preferring the complete shielding of deer farms from a necessary and responsible practice, and thereby sacrificing Pennsylvania’s wild deer herd and the huge sustainable, renewable economy built on managing those wild deer.

This poor policy from the PA Dept. of Ag is really bad government on display. This is Bad Government 101. Actually, this is failed government.

You cannot make this stuff up, and the CWD situation here highlights why political involvement in a democracy is so important. If you sit back and wait for someone else to solve problems, most often no one else will get involved. You have to lead the charge yourself, and thereby attract fellow supporters.

If you want to get involved, call the PA Dept. of Ag at this number, 717 -772-2853, and tell the nice person who answers the phone that you want DOUBLE FENCING at all deer farms. It is as simple as this.

And if you don’t give a whit about hunting or deer management, consider the impacts CWD will have on other wildlife beyond wild deer. It is an earthquake building under our feet, and we can stop it, if we want to.

Although his Hungarian Communist Party and its allied Socialists earned positions in only about 20% of the Hungarian government in the 1930s through election results, despite making their case to the Hungarian people in election after election, the Communists slowly bullied their way into controlling more positions of societal control, like the Hungarian police and the courts.

And yes, they literally bullied their way into these powerful positions by publicly whining, and complaining, and feigning hurt when rejected, with real displays of petulance and foot-stomping, and crying how unfair it was that they could not fully participate in public life, even though their views were repudiated over and over at the ballot box.

They falsely appealed to good people’s sense of fairness, and lied about their true intentions. Slowly they gained traction.

Technically their police and judicial roles were just twenty percent of the government functions, but in reality, they were critical choke and control points, where legal matters met criminal punishment matters, and where people’s careers and lives could summarily end.

Mind you, the people in these police and judicial roles were Communists and Socialists. Thus, due process, human rights, fairness, facts, the rule of law, etc. did not matter to them. What did matter to them was control, absolute iron-fisted control of everything, and especially of the government, but also the things that make a government run well, like citizens’ free speech rights, the right to peaceably assemble, etc.

From those police and judicial roles, the Hungarian Communists and Socialists picked off their political opponents, one by one. By creating fake accusations based on mere hearsay and insinuations, they frog-marched innocent people into court rooms where honest and fair justice was the very last thing anyone could expect to encounter.

[we are seeing the same process play out in Washington, DC, where the security apparatus has been captured, politicized, and used to destroy political opposition]

In those courts, where the falsely accused defendants were frequently unable to defend themselves, and where clearly manufactured “evidence” was presented against them, the Communist judges handed down arbitrary and cruel sentences. Usually it was death by strangulation, but sometimes by firing squad. One way or another, people who had been Hungarian nationalists, patriots, leaders, good men and women all, were criminally ensnared by their political opponents.

One by one by one, political opponents of the Communists were literally eliminated, and the remaining fence-sitters were bullied into silence and acquiescence.

Person by person, office by office, Hungary’s Communists gained control of new parts of Hungary’s government, and one by one they bent those new offices into reaching their goal of complete political and social domination.

Eventually, Hungary went from one of Europe’s oldest, greatest, most creative, most successful nations, to one of darkness, where freedom and liberty were unimaginable. And where the cruelest physical tortures and public humiliations were not only imaginable, they were happening nearly daily across the nation.

What better way to bully a populace than to make public examples of people?

[here in central Pennsylvania we had one notable attempt at public shaming and modern public execution some years ago when the thugs at PennFuture tried to get a local meteorologist fired from his TV weather news job because he refused to publicly bow before their claim of man-made global warming…same old same old!]

From Soviet Russia, uber tyrant Josef Stalin smiled, as his minions in Hungary slowly dismantled a free nation and put it under the control of Soviet Communism. Stalin’s chief architect and implementer of Communism in Hungary was Matyas Rakosi.

Rakosi joked about slowly but surely eliminating his political opponents by “slicing them like salami,” one at a time, until the entire group opposing him was gone.

Exactly this is now happening in America. Right now. Under our feet and in front of our noses.

We don’t call it Communism here, but the Political Correctness now slowly taking over our nation is just as cruel, fascist, and intolerant as any Communist regime in Europe ever was. PC’s minions here in America are just as devoted to getting full control of everything as their European counterparts were just two generations ago.

It is worse in Europe now, where fascism is roaring back to life, reincarnated as PC. Two days ago a British court held a man guilty (of something vague and subjective) and DESTINED FOR JAIL for the awful crime of teaching his cute little dog to do the Hitler salute on YouTube. No lie. Meanwhile, England is disintegrating under the weight of petty crime, which cannot be punished, because the perpetrators are overwhelmingly “protected populations.”

America’s best institutions have been completely captured by PC: The media, the educational system from top to bottom, government, the military, communal institutions, even places like Chautauqua Institution. All turned into weapons, implementing PC and control, and the elimination of political opposition.

Nearly all of these places have routine public humiliations, shaming, and summary “executions” of political misfits. Chautauqua Institution fired one of its best vice presidents because she was too supportive of Israel’s right to exist. Universities routinely fire professors who exhibit any free thought beyond the arbitrary bounds set by PC.

This weekend we will see another Communist public bullying event in Washington, DC.

It is a fake march about nothing, though on the outside this march is against private gun ownership and the NRA. The march is not about the actual facts, actions, processes and programs (like “PROMISE”) that resulted in Nikolas Cruz shooting his fellow Parkland students.

Rather, the march is aimed at falsely accusing and publicly shaming America’s legal gun owners and their chosen private organization, the NRA, of having been complicit in Cruz’s massacre.

When in fact, it is the gun control groups and their political enablers who are the most responsible for that massacre.

We are seeing Rakosi’s old “salami tactics” right here in front of us, playing out again. Trial-by-media, false accusations, public shaming, bullied citizens slowly giving up more and more of their control of their government to tyrants, who really just “mean well.”

We have one political party aggressively acting as the official vehicle for PC, and the other political party pretending to put up a fight, while focused on its pensions, power, secret pay-offs, and crony capitalism.

The question is, will we be complacent and compliant, like the Hungarians, and watch our freedoms be slowly pried away from us by career politicians and unaccountable bureaucrats, under false pretenses?

Or will we fight back?

One way you can fight back is to not stand on the sideline while the salami slices are being made. When you see your neighbor, friend, colleague or fellow activist get picked up and picked off and spirited away for the kangaroo court event, you can and should intervene.

James D. Julia was in full-throated auctioneer mode when I hung up the phone earlier today, his voice rising high above all the other competing voices.

With a standing-room-only crowd at Julia’s Auction in Fairfield, Maine, the background noise was overwhelming, even on the phone. Today being Julia’s last-ever auction, the place is packed to the gills with people who just want to experience it and be able to say “I was there.”

“Please yell at me, like you are mad at me, OK?,” instructed Debbie, the Julia’s Auction employee assigned to handle my phone-in bid. She could hardly hear herself, much less her client on the other end of the line. I, too, could only hear a roar, a cacophony of voices, with the auctioneer’s voice occasionally rising above it.

I have been to Julia’s several times, and it has never been anything like this chaos.

Yes, it is a long drive from central Pennsylvania, but if you are into the stuff I am into, then the drive is worth it. If for no other reason than to inspect in person the various antiques (my wife calls it all ‘rusty junk’) of interest.

Julia’s firearms catalogues are phenomenal, presently approached in quality and accuracy only by Amoskeag Auctions, but there is no substitute for being there and seeing the items in person.

Please understand that Julia’s catalogues are more than just sales listings. They are historic repositories of hard-won information, useful to researchers of all sorts, as well as helping set some parameters on overall market prices.

Julia’s catalogue photographs set the industry standard. Nor have I ever seen an example where Julia’s mislead or provided an inaccurate description of some item. No doubt it has happened, but compared to the other auction houses, Julia’s descriptions are perfection. Gospel, really.

The Lancaster double rifle I was interested in came up quickly, and before I could indicate a number, it was already at double what I was prepared to bid. On quick second thought, I was ready to bid higher, but by then the auction price was already beyond double my highest bid, which was still forming in my mouth.

“Do you want to bid?,” asked Debbie.

“Nope. I’m out, it is already way beyond my highest” said I.

“But it was nice just to be able to bid one last time at Julia’s, a place I have come to love and fear,” I said.

Debbie laughed at my joke, and then after a few brief pleasantries she said goodbye, moving on to help the next phone bidder in what will probably go down in the history books as the most expensive, frenetic, chaotic firearms auction ever.

Fortunately or unfortunately, Julia’s has been purchased by Morphy Auctions here in central Pennsylvania.

I say unfortunately, because no one likes to see a good thing change, and Julia’s is not only a good thing, it has been the best thing in antique firearms auctions, bar none. So now that it is becoming part of Morphy Auctions, it is disappearing.

I say fortunately, because the merger will bring all the highest-end antique firearms to Morphy, which is much, much closer to my home. No more long, long drives to south-central Maine. But this may be too close.

And that is why I say unfortunately, because now that all these guns will be on display so close to my home, like less than an hour away, I will end up acting like a kid in a candy shop: Out. Of. Control.

Oh, my suffering wife. Yet more rusty junk, honey!

Which brings me to a much more poignant point: Don’t assume things will always be so, because in truth things are always changing. When you see something good, and it looks right, and it is going to bring you pleasure, or happiness, or a good investment, then strike while that iron is hot.

Just five months ago, Julia’s previous firearms auction had barely anyone in attendance. Hardly any bidding occurred on most of the firearms there. Maybe one or two bids per item, except for the especially rare or collectible, with most going for just one low bid, filed by absentee bidders. No one knew then that Julia’s was going to be merged with Morphy, and so no one showed much interest.

Had people known then what they know today…that October 2017 auction would have been a mad house, like today is, and the assemblage of fine, one-of-a-kind firearms would have been much more competitive.

For those of us who did participate, we reaped the benefits of low competition.

Goodbye, Julia’s! You will be missed. We welcome to central Pennsylvania the many outstanding firearms experts who have made Maine their home in the past decades. They will be happy here, surrounded by lots of natural beauty and an all-American culture that does not punish or stigmatize gun ownership.

My only hope is that Morphy carries on the same high quality catalogues that Julia’s produced, in style, substance, photography, and descriptive accuracy. That is one thing the industry cannot afford to lose.

This total DC insider ratfink fake FBI agent McCabe gets busted by his fellow Obama appointees for being especially good at lying, breaking the law, and using his official position for personal gain.

He gets fired. Like life and work are supposed to happen, right?

Now he is on the Pity Me I am a Victim Tour.

He egregiously broke laws meant to keep our republic steady, and when caught, he pretended that it was all so unfair, so mean, that everyone turned against him.This guy is the poster child for No Integrity and Massive Corruption.

If you were impressed by the Sore Losers Against Democracy march in early 2017, where hypocritical whiners convened in DC to complain about a defect in one man they had gleefully celebrated in the multiples when another man was in the Oval Office, then you are in for a big treat this March 24th.

Following Nikolas Cruz’s illegal and totally avoidable murderous rampage in Parkland, Florida, the same hypocritical whiners are gathering once again in DC.

This one is the Hokey Hookie Parade.

And though this includes a bunch of school kids forced from school by activist teachers, the parade is very much the same old gun prohibitionist groups we have all come to know in various guises over the years. The same T-shirts, signs, posters, and demands as the past. Americans rejected them before, so maybe a new tack will help, these activists think.

Instead of asking how Cruz’s dozens of failed encounters with local, state and federal law enforcement resulted in his massacre of his classmates, and instead of asking how the Obama-era PROMISE program deliberately shielded violent kids like Cruz (and Cruz specifically) from being held accountable and thus actually permitted him to get the gun and combine it with his publicly advertised lunatic fantasies, and instead of asking why gun control groups create the conditions for and then welcome these massacres so they get the blood in the streets that fuel their emotional appeals for more government control over free citizens, the whiners are blaming law-abiding gun owners, a civil rights organization (the NRA), and even inanimate objects (guns).

The NRA did not pull the trigger, Cruz did. The NRA did not create the “Gun Free Zone” filled with violent criminal students, the gun prohibitionists and Obama’s PROMISE program did. The gun did not kill those kids, Nikolas Cruz did.

And how does limiting law-abiding gun owners do anything against crime?

Law-abiding gun owners use guns every day to defend themselves and others from violent criminals. And yes, they even use AR15s.

Armed law enforcement officers actually stood outside the school, with their firearms drawn, listening to Cruz murder his classmates. They failed to intervene, and they could have easily killed or wounded Cruz and stopped his massacre. They had no idea what he was armed with, and in any event that is irrelevant: As Cruz walked through the Gun Free Zone with impunity, any armed person who showed up could have easily stood behind a wall or door and waited for Cruz to walk by, and then shot him. Or they could walk up behind him and shoot him.

These are all dramatic failures. Adult failures, government failures, bureaucrat failures. None of these have an atom in common with regular every-day gun owners across America or their chosen organization, the NRA.

I once worked with a deeply unhappy lady who would invent office conflicts and problems out of thin air, so she could then heroically swoop in and impose dramatic and totally fake solutions. No problems existed but what she had created, or simply alleged. No solutions were needed. But she was not after solutions, she was after control. And half the time she got it, through administrative acts or by sheer bullying. She apparently needed this process to satisfy a hurtful, dark craving in her soul, and only late in her career, long after she had committed tremendous damage to many people and the institution itself, did a brave boss eventually step in and end her tyranny.

Such a situation exists here and now with America’s gun prohibitionists.

They created the conditions for Parkland to occur, and they have hijacked this emotionally loaded and most avoidable massacre to suit their purpose of imposing an unpopular and unneeded solution.

Like the alcohol prohibitionists and racial segregationists before them, gun prohibitionists are control-freak fanatics who believe they are on a mission from God. Nothing they do is ever wrong, and every fakery they commit is acceptable, in their minds. The end-goal justifies every method, right or wrong, moral or immoral.

The gun prohibitionists bully and bluff their way into imposing a solution that has zero connection with the actual crime itself, or with the cause of the crime.

Hopefully regular Americans wake up and confront them, stop them, hold the failed bureaucrats accountable in Parkland and Broward County, and end the PROMISE program.

Stealing freedom from everyday Americans is not an answer, it is just one more big problem, leading to yet more problems.

One of the future problems is going to be a lot of young children scarred by the hype and fake moral outrage surrounding the Parkland events. God knows where that then goes. One answer is to send a bill to CeaseFirePA and its affiliates for all of the emotional counseling needed after their fake drama plays out with all these impressionable young kids.

These kids should be in school on March 24th, not being used as cultural revolution cannon fodder by prohibitionist zealots.

Our family burns a lot of firewood every cold season. Usually beginning in late October and going through February, sometimes into March, we burn split oak 24 hours a day.

Nothing heats up a room better and takes the chill out of the air than a fire in a modern wood or coal stove, and nothing provides a better centralized gathering place for people to read, doze, study, or talk than a fire place or stove. It is a real comfort, and if we think about it, humans sitting by a comforting fire goes back what, 100,000 years? Or six thousand? Either way, a long time.

We are back at it once again today, tending a fire, having now endured Winter’s recent biting return without a fire the past week or so. Something about this late season chill just works its way into the bones. Maybe we kind of let down our guard, anticipating Spring, eager to shed the heavy coats and boots, and enjoy the warm air and freedom to lounge outside once again. Whatever the reason, the harsh cold issues a strong call for the fire today, and so we lit one. We will run it constantly until we are fully out of Winter’s grip, and enjoying the comfort of the warm sunlight.

There is another sort of fire, however, and this one will never die out.

It is the fire of human passion, and love, and friendship.

It is that kind of fire which two people share after twenty five years of happy marriage together.

Sure, there are some tough times along that twenty-five years, some hard words, some bruised feelings in that period. Birthing and then raising three kids in that time means some disagreement and frustration are inevitable. But these things are part and parcel of living a committed life. And in a way, resolving the disputes makes the fire hotter, Polonius’ hoops of steel stronger. There is no walking out or walking away, quitting when the going gets tough. There is only commitment, fire. Ebbing, flowing, sometimes blazing hot, sometimes a bed of coals, but always a lit fire.

As a much missed now-deceased life advisor used to say to me, two married people are like two knives, constantly rubbing against one another, sharpening one another’s blade. The knives are working tools, cutting through life, getting work done, and by working together side by side, they also continually sharpen each other’s blades, their cutting edges, the working parts. Once in a while they nick one another. That is just the nature of the tool, the nature of married life. The little nick goes with the territory of work.

It is a good analogy, good enough for me. Because when I look back on twenty-five years of good marriage, as marked today, I feel like we are both still sharp, the Princess of Patience still looks sharp, and our cutting edges are holding up strong.

Said the other way, I have been sitting by a particular fire now for twenty-five years. Once in a while, while tending it, it has singed me, or given me a minor blister, reminding me of its inherent powerful force. Given that I am klutzy, it is logical that I earned those little burns.

But usually this fire is my friend, my best friend, in fact. I am looking forward to another twenty-five years of her warmth and comfort.

Lately the raving feedback on my pickled eggs has inspired me to post here the home-made recipe I use.

What are pickled eggs?

They are a Pennsylvania Dutchy native food, originating from the pre-refrigeration time, when salting pork and beef, and soaking vittles in salt and vinegar, was the only way to preserve food, to keep it from going bad. Only so much food could be kept cool in a spring house, or hanging cured in a smoke house.

So pickled eggs are hard boiled eggs that are soaked in a salty brine with various flavors tossed in to suit your own palate. One thing I have not tried are deviled eggs made from pickled eggs. I will bet they’d be mighty tasty.

You need a sealable one gallon glass jar; I re-use an empty (repurposed) pickle jar with a steel lid.

Into the empty and cleaned jar empty one can of sliced beets in beet juice. Brine or citric acid in the beets is fine, but just keep a running tally in your head or on a slip of paper of how tangy or savory the brine is going to taste.

Then either from the hot sink tap or on the stove top heat up four to six cups of water in a pot, and according to your own taste, add two to four tablespoons of salt and a table spoon or two of granulated white sugar. Mix in the salt and sugar in warming water until it is dissolved.

The hardcore Germans among us will want more sugar. A lot more sugar. A sickening amount of sugar. Don’t ask me why, it’s just one of those odd sweet tooths that people brought over from Europe. I myself like my eggs savory, not sweet.

Turn off the heat. No need to boil or simmer. Just get it hot enough to turn the salt and sugar into a solution, and then pour half to 2/3 of it into the big jar. Reserve the rest; it might be needed.

Then pour into the jar two cups of apple cider vinegar. You can spruce this up with balsamic vinegar, malt vinegar, a bit of white or wine vinegar, and you can always put in more or less to suit your own taste buds. But for the sake of starting out, let’s just begin with two cups of apple cider vinegar, which Heinz sells in gallon and two-gallon jugs.

Now add 12-18 hard boiled eggs (peeled!) to the jar.

[Note: Eggs boil best when the water is a roiling boil and the eggs are added quickly, boiled high for five minutes under a lid, and then kept under lid for 30 minutes after the heat is turned off. Eggs boiled this way will peel easily and perfectly]

A table spoon of mashed or minced garlic, a quarter teaspoon of dill weed, and a dash of basil into the jar will together give a nice flavor.

At this point your jar should have some room in it before the liquid reaches the very top, just below the lid. You can throw in a couple sliced carrots and some sliced onions. Now, there will be a tiny bit of room left at the top, and you should fill this in with more vinegar and \or the reserved brine, depending on your taste buds.

Close the lid tightly, go to the sink, and slowly turn the whole jar upside down, then back, then upside down again. A few of those turns and everything inside is mixed up. In the winter time you can put the jar in the pantry or mud room for a few days to let the eggs pickle. In the summer you will have to have a very cool basement corner, or else put the jar in the fridge for a few days.

After 2-3 three days, the eggs and vegetables are pickled. The eggs will be colored reddish-pink throughout, even into the yolk. The vegetables will be yummy. Use a spaghetti strainer to reach into the jar and pull out a couple eggs and some vegetables. Put them on a plate and serve cold. We also put them sliced into salads.